Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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A. Moudrov. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading” precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (“Good Readers” 6) to find it comparable to the spirit of Plato’s works which merge philosophical pursuits with artistic endeavors. On the day of Socrates’ execution, a friend caught him writing poetry. One cannot imagine Socrates writing in the first place, let alone writing poetry. Socrates responds by saying that he “tried to find out the meaning of certain dreams and to satisfy my conscience in case it was this kind of art they were frequently bidding me to practice. The dreams were something like this: the same dream often came to me in the past, now in one shape now in another, but saying the same thing: ‘Socrates,” it said, ‘practice and cultivate the arts’” (60e-61a), the message which Nabokov, if only he had noticed it, would have been inclined to accept at least privately—but deny it in print.
NOJ / НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I / 2007 REFERENCES Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov’s Other World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Connolly, Julian W. Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Nabokov, Vladimir. Einladung zur Enthauptung. Trans. And Commentary by Dieter E. Zimmer, Reinbeck be Hamburg: Rohwohlt, 1990. _______. The Gift. New York: Vintage International, 1991. _______. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Vintage International, 1989. _______. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Nabokov, Vladimir, and Edmund Wilson. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: 1940-1971. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. New York: Harper Colophon, 1979. Peterson, Dale. “Literature as Execution.” Nabokov: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Plato. Phaedo. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977. _______. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992. _______. Timaeus. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, 1151-1211. Shapiro, Gavriel. Ed. Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading.” New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. Shute, Jenefer. “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power.” Diss. UCLA, 1983.
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Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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